Plumbing the depths inside yourself is not easy work. It is difficult work.
the way to break free of what we are is to find out who we might have been, and to try to restore some kernel of our lost essence. (RK)
Allons! through struggles and wars! The goal that was named cannot be countermanded.
Have the past struggles succeeded? What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature? Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.
My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion, He going with me must go well arm’d, He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions.
Me, I adhere to my salt. I draw strength from it, use it. I keep watch over my salt, and when it serves me, I keep watch over other people’s salt. I mine my salt, and sometimes, I mine the salt of others. Which is to say: I cooperate with the part of them that they can’t reach, are not in touch with, cannot see, but that sometimes, when I am lucky, I can see quite well.
For nuance and verve, English wins. We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out. Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and our subcultures and our street style, our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom. The French might have better novels (Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert) and they have better cheeses (Comté, Roquefort, Cabécou). But in the grand scheme that’s basically nothing.
Alexander Pope’s 1711 “An Essay on Criticism,” which hails the critic as “the Muse’s judge and friend.”
[…]
“An Essay on Criticism” is written in heroic couplets and divided into three parts. Part One begins rather acidly: “’Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill / Appear in writing or in judging ill.” Poets may test our patience, Pope claimed, but critics—partial, arrogant, defensive—“mislead our sense.” Their writing was distorted by “false learning,” “pretending wit,” “vain ambition,” and “needful pride.” The drive to censure turned them into drones, “half-form’d insects” that swarmed by the dozens to a single dull verse. Like Johnson’s critics, Pope’s critics were fallen creatures, moderns with no compass to guide their judgment other than the “glimm’ring light” of their own minds, which too often bent sinister. But it was not always so, Pope assured us. High on Parnassus, the precepts of art were derived from the poetry of the ancients, which the first critic brought down to earth. He was like Prometheus, only guileless and gentlemanly: “The gen’rous critic fann’d the poet’s fire, / And taught the world with reason to admire.”
“The gen’rous critic,” as Pope reconstructed him in Parts Two and Three of the essay, had a great capacity for “gen’rous pleasure” and a highly developed sense of commensurability, which allowed him to “regard the writer’s end / Since none can compass more than they intend.” The generous critic identified and accepted the work’s intentions, its conventions.
[…]
Running underneath Pope’s account of the commensurability between the generous critic and the text was a wonderfully complex and democratic theory of pleasure. Pleasure, for Pope, arose neither from the critic’s purely subjective reaction nor from the poem’s objective perfection. It derived from the mingling of admiration and reason—“a happiness as well as care.” Reason reconciled wholes and parts, intentions and expectations, to show “the joint force and full result of all.”
Arrest occurs at a point of inconcinnity between the actual and the possible, a blind point where the reality of what we are disappears into the possibility of what we could be if we were other than we are. But we are not. (AC)
